My Biggest Win: Outsourcing to the Right People
Outsourcing is one of the biggest return on investments. As a startup or business owner, the hardest thing you have to do is intelligently…
Outsourcing is one of the biggest return on investments. As a startup or business owner, the hardest thing you have to do is intelligently deploy capital on things that grow your business. Make the wrong decisions and you can go bankrupt. Make the right decisions and your business will be wildly successful.
Well, where do you usually deploy your capital? On humans. That’s interviewing and hiring employees. The all-in costs for a sales development rep can cost between $110-$120K a year. The equivalent costs for outsourcing this to a lead generation company? $12–24K a year. You can literally have them do all the prospecting and set up appointments for you at a fraction of a full-time employee.
Choosing the Right People
Your stereotypical outsourced partner.
I know you hear tons of horror stories about outsourcing to offshore companies. It’s not about that. You want to outsource to only people who are truly experts at what they do. You have to actually trust them with your business. Your relationship is critical. They need to be aligned on success.
Here are some things you wanna ask them and make sure they nail it:
- What is the process of your service?
- What happens on a day-to-day basis?
- Who will I be working with?
- How much work is required from me?
- Do you have any successful clients?
- How do you guarantee ROI?
- Who are your competitors and why are you better?
Outsource Stack
Here is an example of outsourced services that you can use across multiple business functions.
HubStaff — Automatic time tracking and monitoring with screenshots, application monitoring, internet monitoring, automatic payroll, and reports. Integrates with Basecamp, Trello, Asana, Podio, Paypal and over 30 more applications. Allows you to see exactly what your team is working on in real time and includes work notes, and in-depth reports.
Inspire Beats — An all-in-on lead generation solution. They help you find quality leads, research them, craft personalized outbound messages, follow up and set you appointments. We all know the amount of work this takes is a big pain. They handle the grunt work for you.
Good Audience — That’s us and we fit into the outsource stack for all your social media marketing needs. We manually craft personalized content, share across your social networks, handle customer support, community management, and drive awareness for your brand. 69% percent of all people who follow a brand on social media end up buying from them. Think about that.
StaffZen — Hire from their network of world-class web and mobile developers for just $47/hour. They’re based in San Francisco and you can hire them on a by day, week, or month basis. Avoid the hassle of interviewing developers, setting up, and managing the process.
Rainforest QA — They automate your functional and integration testing with their QA-as-a-Service API. Human testing at the speed of automation. Run your tests in 30 minutes against their 50,000 strong human-powered team.
Everclimb — Unlimited support for your Ruby on Rails app. Get an on-demand developer for unlimited support, small changes and quick fixes. We all know we need to put dedicated resources in making sure applications are stable.
Sorry as a Service — They ship hand-made personalized gifts that fit with your brand and will delight your customers. Unexpected delights have a significant impact on customer loyalty. Have you ever sent your customers handwritten xmas cards, stuffed them in an envelope, put a stamp on and then take it to the post office? This will save you time!
Reboot — The main ROI of coaching is to have people not be confused, scared and generally freaked out which translates to a huge boost in productivity, and general well being. They work with individuals, teams and whole organizations on professional and personal leadership development.
What’s your outsourcing stack?
Tell us how you’ve managed to grow your business without hiring full-time employees. What has worked for you?